Sustainability Influences Enterprise Purchasing Decisions

More organisations worldwide are building sustainability into their service provider selection and purchasing processes, according to the results from the 2012 Rackspace Green Survey, conducted by Rackspace Hosting, the cloud computing service provider.

Rackspace randomly selected 2000 customers, of which 232 responded. This year, customers from 24 countries responded to the survey including participants from the U.K., New Zealand, Australia and Brazil.

When questioned on the importance of sustainability versus cost, a margin of only 8 percentage points separates responses from customers in the United States from those in the other 23 countries: 72 percent of U.S. respondents and 80 percent of international respondents say that “greener is better.”

Rackspace’s findings point to an increasingly established trend to embrace and include sustainability practices within the purchasing process. When it comes to influencing purchasing decisions, 72 percent of the U.S. respondents said they believe sustainability is important in selecting a service provider as well as influencing a purchasing decision. In the rest of the world, 91 percent, build sustainability into their purchasing decisions on either a periodic or standard basis. Countries outside the United States seem to put a greater emphasis on weighting sustainability as part of purchasing decisions.

“Looking at this year’s results, we are seeing a clear correlation between service provider selection including a sustainability factor and the weight sustainability has in the purchasing decision,” said Melissa Gray, Rackspace Director of Sustainability. “We see sustainability expanding from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘need to have,’ as companies understand that selecting solid partners as part of their supply chain translates into lower risk, more efficiency and more reward.”

Gray added, “Rackspace views sustainability in a very holistic manner: that decisions should factor benefit to people, pocket and planet. We were happy to see that many of our customers also view it this way, with more than 53 percent of respondents echoing this holistic view.”